Geek culture and hacker culture used to be relatively apolitical, but now every action that you take and every piece of code that you write has political effects. You may may intend some of these effects, you may not intend most of these effects, but they’re there and we need to start thinking about and understanding these changes.
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Sketching the talk out last night, I decided […] to summarize briefly, reflecting back on everything that I’ve built recently. It can kind of be summarized as “the infrastructure by which I (and others) wish to live doesn’t exist; so we’ve no choice but to build it ourselves.” I kind of describe this and a lot of the other things I do at this present moment as being the soft end of stacktivism.
So much of the work that is being done by the government is actually being done by third parties, and it’s a very lucrative business. So I went to this office park and kind of just walked around it, and it’s boring. It’s really kind of weird and boring and it’s weird to think about the fact that these companies that are enormous and involved in pretty unseemly shit appear like this, like this kind of crappy building with this kind of crappy public art.
[A]ll these hidden infrastructural and material costs go into the stuff that we just use very very quickly. We just kind of consume them, we don’t think about them, we just want to go on with our lives. When you start actually sort of picking away, looking at it all, you realize how shocking it is.
It’s this infrastructure that is unseen, because it is infra-structure, it is under the structure. And when you start thinking about this massive web of technologies that keep you alive, the only interfaces we have on a day-to-day basis are tap, turn, flush. Everything else is hidden and unseen.